A Certain Shade of Green
by Chuck's Prophet
Summary: "Green held a special place in his memory. Not because it was the emblem of nature, but because it was the emblem of his desire. " Destiel. One!shot. Shower!kink.
1. Prologue: The Colors of the Universe

_You've been raised in limitation, _

_But that glove never fit quite right. _

_The time has passed for hand-me-downs, _

_Choose anew, please evolve, _

_Take flight _

_What are you waiting for?_

_-Incubus, "A Certain Shade of Green"_

**A Certain Shade of Green**

AN: I owe a hearty slice of pie to everyone and anyone who has ever Followed or Favorited my stories. This is for my best friend, (which, even I know, is a complete understatement) whose milestone birthday is rapidly approaching. It's not fun, growing up. That's why we write. **Happy birthday Eve!**

Splayed across the galaxy in vibrant hues were the colors of mortality. Red for every soul fighting an absent cause, hemorrhaging like a beacon would light into an obscure ocean. Copper for the scads of currency endowed into an indefinite, perpetual succession that never concludes. And, the brightest of all, yellow, for the stagnant hope sleeping in the hearts a forthcoming generation.

These colors, however, were merely the garlands of the sunset that Castiel was watching with waning curiosity. The colors he was countersigning were part of a warm assemblage. There were hundreds upon thousands of pigments that were omitted from the group. But there was one particularly that he spent the most time fantasizing about: green. Green held a special place in his memory. Not because it was the emblem of nature, but because it was the emblem of his desire.

Dean Winchester's eyes held the fluencies of the world that he knew, the world that he was currently watching from a bird's eye view (because even as an angel, Earth was a rarefied stone in a galaxy comprised of rocks). He could see—anyone would either have to be doused in ignorance or blind not to—the remnants of those he once loved, speckled like sawdust around his irises. These were the fragments of the physical and analytical wars that spiraled into a deep, indefinite succession of pain. His eyes held not only emerald, but the promise of hope in yellow granite-like slivers, not too visible, but not lost amid the myriad poverties he had suffered. It was in these eyes, and only these eyes, that Castiel had been able to delineate the true visage of humanity: strength with an interminable potency to take down a thousand seething suns.

_Desire_; he surprised his own intellect when he came across that word. Desire was a multifaceted emotion. One commonality among all types of desire was that it was always acted upon like a spirit consuming its host: the more that the spirit imbibed in the human-force sustenance, the less intelligible the host became. This desire, this coveting inside of him, was similar to that. Whenever Castiel was around the human, he couldn't form a coherent thought. It was almost as if he imbibed his own words, and melancholy crept over him like the waves lapping over the ocean that he sat upon.

As much as it pained him that he didn't act on his desires, it pained him even more to believe that Dean wouldn't want the same. Dean was his best friend, and Castiel was the same to him. But comfort would only stretch so far until he exchanged it with someone else, more preferably a female vessel—which Castiel presumes is because he never had the occasion to find it within his own mother. Perhaps, yes, he could leave Jimmy Novak behind in pursuit of a vessel more pleasing to the hunter's eye, but not only would he be deceiving the man who he had made a vow to protect his family, but Dean as well. Dean has always acknowledged him as the "holy tax accountant" that he was riding. If he displaced his vessel, Dean would know—or wouldn't know and then he would have involuntarily copulated with the angel and Castiel couldn't bear the thought of blind-siding Dean like that. But he also couldn't bear the thought of being second-rate in Dean's beautiful, friable eyes.

He wanted to do these things—he realized on a night similar to this when his gamut of thoughts wouldn't pass through the barrier in which they had come—because he wanted to expose himself to the hunter. Although it wouldn't ever be his true countenance, it would be everything that he could possibly have to give his embryonic soul away. He not only wanted to feel Dean's fixation on his totality, but also to take in Dean's as well. He wanted to feel every crest, know every curvature that he had pulled from damnation in the palms of his calloused hands. He wanted Dean's lips to converse through his, feel his tongue materializing the words just as quickly as they disintegrated on his tongue. He wanted the proximity of their bodies to never be close enough, to always feel the need to be closer with every touch, every breath, and every sound that Dean made as he asphyxiated him in this so-called desire.

Desire was wicked. Desire was ruthless. Desire was gluttony in disguise, but he wouldn't sojourn until he and his desires have been pacified.

Only, little did Castiel know that it would never be enough. Once he was inside Dean Winchester, there was no amount of hope large enough that could pull him from the fire that would consume him indefinitely.


	2. The Sacrifice

Water rained onto the marble floor, illuminating the hardwood shingles. There were small crevices in-between the inlay where the searing water would intermittently seep through from eons of wear-and-tear. His eyes dithered through the vehement steam, but it hadn't taken long to see the figure before him. His shoulder blades—which looked more like razorblades veiling behind bronze flesh—cascaded down his arms in perpetual circles comprised of muscle. His back obeyed to the measure of his limbs, twisting and bending to unsheathe a deep cleft just above his waist. His hips were the most perplexing part of him; though they were maimed from years of hunting—umpteen layers of embroidery holding the skin intact would illustrate that best—it stuck out stronger than a sore thumb as the most resilient muscle. His ass came second, two firm tetragons cemented together. Below that were his legs, exposed to new epidermis wounds that Castiel hadn't been cognizant of. He vied to push the thought away that something had happened to the man that he raised without a single abrasion.

His stitching was about as foreign as his own vessel was to him. The angel's knowledge of the human anatomy was rendered completely obsolete. The last time he had seen a mortal's frame was when he had been presented with a painting of an angel raising a man from the bloody furnace of hades. Whenever a human soul is taken to perdition, it was like stripping an onion, the skin representing the casing of a person, what verity divides them from the rest, and the odious smell representing the insignia of a spirit that turned sour. When the soul is stripped, the configuration of the soul is stripped. It was, in an understatement, a hostile procedure eradicating a soul from Hell. It takes a gentle hand—which Castiel would like to believe he still has—to handle one. Souls can corrode, wither, die, or even explode upon exposure to the new world, taking their host along with them.

So yes, Dean's body had been unembellished upon raising him. But at the time, Castiel hadn't paid much mind to it. Yes, from a peripheral view, Dean was beautiful. But it was his soul that he had been captivated by. His soul though cracked and scorned and beaten inexorably even before his time down under, was the most authentic one he had ever encountered. He saw, through the holes and the cracks that never seemed to reconcile, not even with all of the grace in Heaven, a man whose life was comprised of sacrifice. While some would say on Earth that this kind of soul isn't worth a damn, in Heaven, a martyr was valued above a million other souls.

The physical feelings kicked in again, especially seeing Dean in this form. This time, instead of just his soul, all of him was bare. His vessel's slacks began to tighten, and, although he couldn't be positive granted that he was standing in an extent that surrounded him in heat, he was perspiring in any place that he adorned skin. He remained still like this for a while, sapphire eyes never averting their gaze from the hunter's backside no matter how hard he tried. He smacked his lips several times when his sleek hands ran more water vertically down his back, illuminating the muscles like it had the tile. What was it about the anatomy of a male specimen that drove his thoughts to insanity?

When he mustered the courage to speak, it came out irregular, jarred like the fragments of the Righteous Man's soul. "Hello Dean."

"_Jesus_!" Dean jumped, scrambling for balance in the confined space. "Cas, what the hell?!" Even the angel had to make a clean breast that maybe that wasn't the _best _approach this time.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to startle you," he said, hoping to compensate for his mistake. The hunter's emerald eyes were frantic. His once tranquil state was substituted with irrepressible quavering. He ran his hands down his frontal, covering the necessities before spiraling to gape at the angel in awe. Cas strained his own from falling on the brown pubic manes coiling in the center of his abdomen. Envy poured through him, envy to be those hairs—

"What do you want?!" Dean growled, breasts convulsing in sync with his perplexed face.

"I—I wanted to tell you something," he managed through clenched teeth.

The other man's eyebrows knitted together, indicating no initial sign of clarity. "And it couldn't wait until _after _I got out of the shower?"

"This task in particular requires that you—no, Dean, it couldn't," he corrected sharply.

"Why?"

He hadn't thought this through well enough. "I, uh—um—"

The older Winchester was still clutching his privates. Cas couldn't help but noticed that his hand had elevated slightly. Dean raked Castiel's new brooding and pensive features. This went on for a while until he thought better to preserve his robust ego (_Oh yeah, still straight) _and averted his fixation to his still _very _naked physique.

When Cas' stammering developed into undertones, Dean exhaled, grumbling, "Can I at least put on some pants?"

"—as you wish," the angel concluded, though remained rooted into the tile. The hunter's eyes narrowed again, perplexity clouding his already irate features.

"Cas… we talked about this…"

The angel looked wounded, like he had just received news that someone in his chain of command had plotted a tripwire underneath the wet ground he was standing on. Dean's splintered forehead eased into fine lines, eyebrows overextending their usual I'm-a-tough-guy boundaries. The last thing that he wanted to do, even if he was the biggest pain-in-the-ass, was to crush an angel's spirit. It sounded like something in a "For Dummies" textbook under the "what not to do unless you want to get fried extra crispy" section.

But Castiel was no such Dummy. He wouldn't obliterate his only friend in a flaming Molotov. No, Castiel's intentions were much worse: he would stand there and gape at you with those big cerulean stones until you could felt like an indecent human being. For a second, Dean thought he saw tears under his eyes, but that could have very well been the steam crafting delusions.

_But I raised you from Perdition, Dean, _Castiel wanted to say, but the letters wouldn't mold themselves into words. _I've seen every apex, every crevice, and every blemish on your body. This isn't uncomfortable for me to watch, and you shouldn't be uncomfortable, either._

It wasn't like he couldn't outwardly confess his thoughts; angels had a decent amount of integrity aside from what the garrison tells him to say. It was, however, written by His prophecy that celestial beings couldn't lie.

"I'm sorry," the other man said after a period of silence, shutting off the water. Cas had to bite down on his lip so that he wouldn't say the same. "Look, it's just been a long day. We nearly made ourselves walking juice cartons for a nest of vamps today, especially Sammy who's more shaken then I've ever seen him, and I'd rather not talk about it…"—clearly not, deducing by the water formulating at the corners of his eyes—"You're okay, right? No trouble in paradise?"

Cas groused somewhere low in his throat. "There's always trouble in Heaven. But that's inevitable, I suppose." Before he could get lost in the security of his thoughts once more, there was a soft _plop_ on the marble tile. Cas' stilled gaze shifted to the floor, though found nothing that the sound could have originated from. The faucet was pressed far enough in and the spigot wasn't sporadically sprouting water droplets.

Confused, he turned to Dean. "What was that?"

Dean was feverish. A deep scarlet smoldered his cheeks, and he involuntarily tightened his clasp on his scrotum. The angel's eyebrows arched in curio. Then he understood.

"Cas I—"

Before Dean could finish, Castiel was backing him against the opposing wall, one hand bracing the hunter's face as he scraped his tongue across his perspiring lips, the other where Dean's had once been clasping fiercely. The fair-haired man nearly threw his head back at the way that Castiel had been holding onto his length—a longtime, yet implicit fantasy of his—had he not been towing his face closer to his. Dean's tongue eventually slid into his mouth, tussling for ultimate dominance.

Cas, however, seemed to want no part in the competition. Cas only seemed to be reconnoitering the wet crevice, slipping and sliding his own wetness around his mouth precariously. This only made Dean's hands, hanging nimbly at his sides, to dart out and draw him closer by his unkempt hairs. As Castiel's body clenched harder against his, so did his member. Castiel took the initiative to knead the muscle with his calloused hands, exploring there, too. His fingers swept against the underside of the roused skin, but when they brushed over and inside his permeable slit, Dean whaled high above what the thin shower walls could contain. He was about to implode between his elongated member and Castiel's own, itching against his flushed skin. Castiel shrugged way momentarily, ridding himself of his suit and undershirt.

Now torso to torso and hip to hip, Dean's hands scrabbled for his belt buckle, removing the cumbersome piece, pants and underwear altogether. For a good few minutes, all there was between them was anatomy exploration (and discovery on both of their behalves; Dean never thought another man's body would feel so good—_his _Cas's body of all men). Then, the hunter broke from another slovenly embrace, to place his own hand over Castiel's unwavering one, and brought their cocks together. Castiel grinned against his saliva-encrusted lips; this had to have been an emblem of amalgamation between partners, the one he had long since been fantasizing about but never thought to be this real.

Interweaving his fingers as Dean began to thrust the both of them, the feel of their abdominal heats pressed against each other allowed them to come simultaneously with diminutive effort. Exhaustion swept over Dean first, head collapsing against the crook of Castiel's neck with his hands buried in his chest. He would have been staggered, if he had more strength in his bent-up system, how the angel remained resilient to almost anything. Cas' digits swathed around his stature, eventually sinking low enough to clasp his buttocks and encompass around a new crevice that practically bellowed for attention.

Dean shook against him, laughing suppressed by the angel's taut physique. "We'll get to that after I get dressed."

"Does this mean that personal space is officially out of the question?" Dean couldn't tell if he was serious, or if he had taken to the phrase lightly. He laughed dumbly again, leaning up to capture Cas' lips in another embrace, chaste, but nonetheless left both more breathless than they needed to be. The angel took that as a yes.

After all, it was a certain shade of green that led him to his partner in the first place.


End file.
